Absolute hires Heath, opens basement suites

Absolute Post has welcomed back its co-founder Sally Heath who rejoins the company as Executive Director.

Absolute has also hired Antoinette De Lisser as Marketing Manager and has now unveiled its new basement suites in its Poland Street headquarters.

Heath has spent the past five years as Head of Production at UNIT and has worked as a producer at The Mill and at Glassworks as Head of Production. In 2004, she co-founded Absolute with Dave Smith and Phil Oldham.

Heath said: “Absolute has always had a welcoming family feel and it’s lovely to come back home. The timing and circumstances just aligned perfectly. Working with the team again is really exciting - it’s been too long! I’m looking forward to shouting very loudly and proudly that I’m with these amazing creative people.”

“Sally is a force of nature,” said Dave Smith. “The depth of knowledge she has of the industry is tremendous – we’re talking over 20 years. She was so important to the genesis of Absolute, so it’s great having her back. She’s been building solid relationships her whole career: she’s amazing with clients, is the best problem solver I’ve ever met, and has a real talent for nurturing artists. It’s a natural fit.”

The facility has also appointed Antoinette De Lisser as Marketing Manager whose experience includes stints at Carlton Television, experiential agency Rocket and Beattie McGuinness Bungay as well as headhunters Red Sofa London and then her own independent headhunting firm, The Legend Company.

Absolute has also unveiled its new pair of basement suites in the Poland Street headquarters.

Absolute has built the suites in the space freed up by its recent moving of the company’s data servers offsite. The move has enabled it to build a grading suite for senior colourist and partner Matt Turner as well as a multi-purpose suite that can be used for colour, VFX, finishing, editing, sound and motion design.

Unlike traditional setups, the 4K suite is laid out with the desk at the back of the room, as opposed to directly in front of the monitor.

“It’s always been a bugbear for me to have clients sitting at the back of the room looking at the back of three people’s heads, needing you to move out the way for them to see the screen,” explains Turner. “We’ve turned the convention on its head so that I’ll be based at the back of the room with the client in front of the screen, making it much more of a cinematic experience, removing the physical barrier between client and screen, allowing them to engage with and focus on the aesthetic without distraction.”

“It’s changing the client experience so that they’re more involved, as there’s sometimes a tendency to feel they’re a step away from the creative process,” explains creative director and co-owner Phil Oldham. “The extra space has allowed us to breathe and is very much driven by the artists. It’s imperative that we have the right space for Matt, Adam Clarke and the rest of our colour team to do their thing; it will always be more about the talent than it will about the technology.”

The basement space was freed up in February 2016 when Absolute moved the entirety of the company’s servers offsite. Now, the Soho-based facility is connected to a brand-new data centre it calls ‘Absolute CTRL’. Situated outside of the capital, Absolute are connected to the datahub through dark fibre cabling, enabling them to operate from their Poland Street headquarters without physical machines on-site.

“Absolute has been in the same building for the entirety of the 14 years we’ve existed,” explains Oldham. “Over the years, we’ve gone up and across, taking two floors in the adjacent building, but by leveraging technology we’ve managed to gain another floor, which is great at a time when post-houses in Soho are getting squeezed out by hedge-fund firms that don't mind paying the eye watering rents.”